Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Tommy Wirkola.
Horror films in the modern era tend to tilt towards the academic and erudite. Sure there’s still wealth of garbage floating around in the ocean, including Minnie’s Midnight Massacre, Spiders on a Plane, and Meth Gator. However, these two worlds — trash and highbrow — seldom come together in perfect harmony.
Just recently Netflix offered us a cinematic treat of the highest order. It was like someone dumped caviar on our popcorn and slipped Domaine de la Romanée-Conti into our gallon trough of Fanta. This popcorn chomping mashup does exist, and it’s called Thrash.
Not to be confused with a new sub-sub genre of Danish metal, Thrash does hail the mind of Norwegian horror director, Tommy Wirkola. The same director that brought us horror comedy classics like Dead Snow and Dead Snow 2: Dead vs. Red.
In Thrash, Wirkola has ditched the snowy confines of Scandinavia and moved to tropical terrain with one the best shark horror films to hit the pond in quite sometime. The film follows a series of seemingly oblivious individuals in small town South Carolina that’s on the verge of a nasty hurricane. Wirkola and his writing team carefully created each character so that they’d be able to seamlessly fit with the film’s other characters and subplots in a fully complimentary fashion.
The cast of Thrash
The characters each bring a unique foible to the film, but Wirkola makes sure that these imperfections are not too obvious, nor are they too distracting. They’re all disparate pieces and parts that support one another through their shark induced traumas. The cast includes:
- Phoebe Dynevor as Lisa, a pregnant woman
- Whitney Peak as Dakota, Dale’s niece with agoraphobia
- Djimon Hounsou as Dr. Dale Edwards, a marine researcher
- Matt Nable as Billy Olsen, the siblings’ foster father
- Andrew Lees as Joe Sprinkle, a TV reporter
- Alyla Browne as Dee, sister of a trio of foster siblings
- Stacy Clausen as Ron, older brother of Dee and Will
- Dante Ubaldi as Will, younger brother of Ron and Dee
Early on in the film Wirkola also manages to mete out elements of foreshadowing that pile on top of one another in the most satisfying way. If you’re a film fan that hates the obvious then these cinematic devices may be rather cloying. However, if you’re too busy chomping on your popcorn and caviar, then Thrash will deliver.
Thrash offers well placed gags, plot points, and action that will keep you full engaged. Most importantly, while there is use of CGI, it’s not overbearing. The sharks look plausibly sized. The waves that tumble on to the town appear to be ripped from the headlines of your subconscious and not an end-of-the-world AI mishmash. In the same way that Crawl made the idea of a two ton alligator in your bathroom more or less believable, Thrash allows the audience to participate in the same fears in a wholly credible manner.
Should you see Thrash?
What this film tells us about ourselves is that we don’t need to be too smart or too dumb. We can simultaneously make room for Cocaine Shark and Lake Mungo. Both the insipid and the thoughtful can coexist. It’s rare that they coexist in one place. But this is one of those times.
Mind you, Thrash is not without its problems. There’s a terribly maudlin ending that certainly won’t satiate any film-going gorehounds. While the ending does feature sharks, they don’t appear in the way that you’d wish they would.
More problematic is that the film ends with very little dramatic tension across any of the individual groups of characters that the film follows through its relatively short 86 minute run time. You’ll seldom hear this reviewing pine for a longer film, but Thrash is a film that could have definitely used a couple more minutes of backstory, plot engagement, and character development.
Thrash is Rated R and currently on Netflix.